Will Kaufman's Woodie Guthrie, American Radical seeks to reclaim the "obsessive thinker and fitful strategist" buried in the celebration of the Dust Bowl troubadour.

By Nina C. Ayoub

"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once,"
wrote Joe Hill. "But a song is learned by heart and repeated over
and over." Embracing the words of the Wobblies' martyr, Woody
Guthrie kept an IWW songbook in his breast pocket as he also sought
to use music as a weapon to "fan the flames of discontent," writes
Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the
University of Central Lancashire, in England.